I recently came across a link to a text to which I wish to draw the attention of everyone who works on Russia, war and culture. It is a substantial essay by the French literary historian Georges Nivat, just published in German. This text brought me back to a subject I first raised in the spring of 2022, and for which I then drew a good deal of criticism – not from Western colleagues, but from Ukrainians.
At the beginning of the full-scale invasion I grasped, for the first time and in earnest, the meaning of Pushkin’s poem “To the Slanderers of Russia”. I wrote about it on Facebook at the time. The reaction was telling: in February and March 2022, when Russian missiles were already falling on Ukrainian cities, some of my compatriots answered me roughly like this: war is war, but Pushkin is sacred; Pushkin is about autumn, about love, about “the wondrous moment”, so leave the poet alone. More than four years have passed. Georges Nivat’s essay has prompted me to return to this subject, because it records something important: the West, it seems, is at last beginning to wake up from Pushkin.
THE GOLDEN CALF THAT MUST NOT BE TOUCHED
Over the years of full-scale war the West has learned to condemn Russia in different ways: aggressively, tolerantly, or by tolerantly keeping silent. Yet in all these modes of condemnation one zone remained untouchable. “Great Russian culture” remained a golden calf that no one was permitted to touch. One could sanction banks, freeze assets and expel diplomats, but one could not say that Pushkin, Lermontov or Dostoevsky had anything to do with what was happening in Bucha, Mariupol or Kherson.
Now and then, admittedly, one heard a phrase that truly deserves recognition: where the Russian ballet appears, Russian tanks eventually follow. But Pushkin always stood apart from this logic. What, after all, could one hold against the great poet, the author of unsurpassed descriptions of autumn, winter, spring and summer, the creator of the Russian literary language? It is precisely this “innocence” of the classics that is, in my view, the empire’s most effective defence mechanism. Russian poetry has long functioned simultaneously as a channel and as a shield: as a channel delivering imperial narratives into the reader’s consciousness, and as a shield covering those narratives with the halo of high art. It justifies and it legitimises. Unfortunately, few people in the West understand this. And, worse still, many people do not understand it even in Ukraine.
WHO GEORGES NIVAT IS AND WHY HIS VOICE CARRIES WEIGHT
Georges Nivat is a renowned literary historian and Slavist who was a professor at the University of Geneva from 1974 to 2000. He is a man who has devoted his whole life to Russian culture: a scholar and translator of Solzhenitsyn, the author of numerous works on Russian literature, a man who was expelled from the USSR in 1960. In other words, he is no “Russophobe” and no chance commentator, but one of the most authoritative Western experts on Russian culture, who for decades served as its advocate in Europe. That is precisely why his present text carries such weight.
Georges Nivat’s essay has appeared in the German journal Lettre International under the title “Pushkin: Singer of Freedom and Apologist of Oppression”, published in the autumn issue, LI 154, of 2026, in the genre of an essay and historical survey. The title alone is already a verdict on the tradition that saw in Pushkin nothing but a “singer of freedom”.
Nivat begins by dismantling a famous formula. The dictum “Pushkin is our everything”, coined by Apollon Grigoryev in 1859, he calls brilliant, yet never true to reality. Georges Nivat then shows how the cult of Pushkin was constructed by the state. The celebrations marking Pushkin’s canonisation took place in 1937 in the village of Mikhailovskoye, that is, shortly after the adoption of the Stalinist constitution, proclaimed “the most democratic in the world”, and at the height of the great Moscow show trials. After the war the place became a site of pilgrimage for millions of visitors, brought there at the state’s expense. And the author’s key conclusion: no one was “Sovietised” as thoroughly as Pushkin. The poet who was meant to be a symbol of resistance to tyranny became one of its icons in the year of the Great Terror. This is not a paradox; it is a pattern.
Judging by the keyword index to the essay, Georges Nivat does not confine himself to the nineteenth century: among the themes of the text are the Warsaw Uprising of 1831, Adam Mickiewicz, Russia’s war against Ukraine, Crimea, Donbas and Putin. In other words, a Western Slavist draws a straight line from Pushkin’s age to the present war. This is exactly what I call an awakening.
“TO THE SLANDERERS OF RUSSIA”: THE ANATOMY OF A POLITICAL MANIFESTO
Now to the poem itself. It should be read not as a lyrical work but as a political document, as a manifesto of imperial foreign policy, written two centuries before Putin’s speeches, yet in the very same grammar.
The context is as follows. In 1830–1831 the November Uprising against Russian rule broke out in the Kingdom of Poland. In the French Chamber of Deputies and in the European press there were calls to support the Poles, even to the point of military intervention. Pushkin wrote the poem at the beginning of August 1831, and in September it was printed in a pamphlet bearing the eloquent title “On the Taking of Warsaw”, together with his own “The Anniversary of Borodino” and a poem by Zhukovsky. Warsaw capitulated on 26 August 1831, the anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, and this symbolism was read by everyone. What we have before us, then, is not a private lyrical response but part of an official propaganda package marking the suppression of a national liberation uprising.
"What is this clamour, orators of the nations? Why do you threaten Russia with anathema? What has roused your wrath? The unrest in Lithuania? Leave off: this is a quarrel of Slavs among themselves, A domestic, ancient quarrel, already weighed by fate, A question that you will never resolve."
Everything is already here. The uprising of a people fighting for its statehood is called “unrest”. Armed suppression is “a quarrel of Slavs among themselves”, that is, an internal, “domestic”, family affair. Europe is plainly shown the door: this is none of your business. And the “quarrel” itself is declared already “weighed by fate”, that is, the question has been decided in advance, and decided in Russia’s favour.
Need one explain to a Ukrainian reader how familiar this formula is? “Russia’s internal affair”, “fraternal peoples”, “one people”, “a civil war in Ukraine”, “the West has no business here” – the entire vocabulary of Kremlin rhetoric of 2014 and 2022 is already written down in six lines of 1831. Poland at that time did not belong to Russia historically, culturally, or by the will of the Poles, and this was of no significance whatever. All that mattered was that the empire considered it its own.
The second stanza formulates the strategic aim:
"Who will prevail in this unequal contest:
The haughty Pole, or the faithful Russ?
Will the Slavic streams merge in the Russian sea?
Or will the sea run dry? That is the question."
Here we have a ready-made hierarchy: the “haughty Pole” against the “faithful Russ”. Arrogance is ascribed to the one who resists, faithfulness to the one who absorbs. And the “Slavic streams” that are to merge in the “Russian sea” are a programme of assimilation set out in poetic language. The alternative is posed starkly: either all the Slavic peoples dissolve in Russia, or Russia “runs dry”. A third option, the coexistence of equal and independent peoples, has no place in this picture of the world. This is not a metaphor; it is a doctrine that, a hundred and ninety years later, would acquire the name “Russian World”.
The third stanza builds a wall between “us” and Europe:
"Leave us alone: you have not read
These bloodstained tablets;
To you this family feud
Is unintelligible, alien;
For you the Kremlin and Praga are mute."
“Family feud” – the family again. Violence within the “family” is not subject to outside judgment: the classic logic of the domestic abuser. The reference to the Kremlin alludes to the Polish presence in Moscow in 1612. And “Praga” is not the Czech capital but a suburb of Warsaw stormed in 1794 by Suvorov’s troops, an assault accompanied by the mass killing of the civilian population. Pushkin recalls this massacre not with regret but as an argument: you Europeans do not understand the “bloodstained tablets” of our history. In other words, the mass killing of civilians is presented as part of a “family” account that Europe has no right to audit.
Next comes the appeal to 1812:
"For what, then? Answer: is it because
On the ruins of blazing Moscow
We would not bow to the insolent will
Of him before whom you trembled?
Is it because we hurled into the abyss
The idol that lay heavy upon kingdoms,
And with our own blood redeemed
Europe's freedom, honour and peace?.."
This is yet another narrative that has survived two centuries unchanged: Russia “saved Europe” and is therefore entitled to its eternal gratitude, and hence to Europe’s silence regarding its own actions. In 1831 it was a matter of Napoleon; in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, of Hitler. The formula “we saved you from fascism, and you hate us” is the direct heir of Pushkin’s “for what, then?”. The liberator who has claimed the right to enslave is the central myth of Russian foreign policy.
The fifth stanza is the most candid. It is no longer an apologia but a threat of war:
"You are formidable in words – now try it in deeds! Or is the old warrior, at rest upon his bed, No longer strong enough to fix his Izmail bayonet? Or has the word of the Russian Tsar grown powerless? Or is it new for us to contend with Europe? Or has the Russian lost the habit of victory? Or are we too few? Or from Perm to Tauris, From the cold Finnish crags to fiery Colchis, From the shaken Kremlin To the walls of motionless China, Glittering with a bristle of steel, Will the Russian land not rise?.."
Everything is here. The “Izmail bayonet” alludes to Suvorov’s storming of Izmail in 1790, another bloody page of imperial expansion on lands that are Ukrainian today. “The word of the Russian Tsar” serves as the source of legitimacy. “Or is it new for us to contend with Europe?” expresses readiness to fight an entire continent. And then comes the geography of empire, an inventory of conquests: Tauris, that is, Crimea, annexed in 1783; Colchis, that is, Georgia, swallowed at the beginning of the nineteenth century; the Finnish crags, that is, Finland, taken from Sweden in 1809. Pushkin lists the colonies as a source of strength, and this land is to “rise”, “glittering with a bristle of steel” – of bayonets. Tauris and Colchis – Crimea in 2014 and Georgia in 2008 – sound today like an operational report rather than a poetic image.
And the finale:
"So send us, then, you orators, Your embittered sons: There is room for them in the fields of Russia, Among graves not strange to them."
That is to say: send us your sons, and we will bury them here beside the graves of Napoleon’s army. This is not poetry; it is what today’s Kremlin television hosts phrase as “we can do it again”, or as threats to turn European capitals into ash. The only difference lies in the level of stylistic mastery. And it is precisely this mastery that is the problem: it turns a threat into a school classic recited by children.
“THE ANNIVERSARY OF BORODINO”: KYIV, VOLHYNIA AND “THE LEGACY OF BOHDAN”
Anyone who believes that the poem concerns only Poland and has nothing to do with Ukraine should read the second text in the same pamphlet, “The Anniversary of Borodino”.
"Risen from his grave, Suvorov beholds Warsaw's captivity; His shade has trembled At the splendour of the glory he began!"
Pushkin openly raises the question of the empire’s borders, and these borders run across Ukrainian land:
"Where shall we move our line of fortresses? Beyond the Bug, to the Vorskla, to the Liman? Who shall keep Volhynia? Who shall keep the legacy of Bohdan? Should rebel rights be recognised, Will Lithuania be torn away from us? Will our Kyiv, ancient and golden-domed, This forefather of Russian cities, Unite with turbulent Warsaw The sanctuary of all its graves?"
Volhynia, “the legacy of Bohdan”, that is, the Hetmanate, Kyiv as “the forefather of Russian cities” – the whole of Ukrainian territory is listed here as imperial property that must not be surrendered. The grievance against the Poles is that they might “tear away” what belongs to Russia, and that Kyiv might be “united” with “turbulent Warsaw”. Ukrainians do not exist in this text as a subject at all. There is only territory and a “sanctuary of graves” over which the empire and the rebels contend. Need one recall that the thesis of Kyiv as “the mother of Russian cities” is still used today to justify Moscow’s claim to Ukraine?
A BARGAIN WITH THE THRONE
Now to who the author of these lines was and from what position he spoke. Pushkin was not a “people’s poet” in the literal sense. Historians of literature and culture settled this question long ago: the distance between the real Russian peasant and Pushkin was as great as that between the North and South Poles. He was a member of the Russian elite and a man who spent much of his life in the light and warmth of imperial power, enjoying its favour and repaying it with no less loyalty.
Georges Nivat examines the key episode of this relationship: Pushkin’s audience with Nicholas I on 8 September 1826 in the Chudov Palace in the Kremlin, to which the poet had been urgently brought from his exile in Mikhailovskoye. Neither the Tsar nor the poet left any written record of this conversation; it was reconstructed by the historian Natan Eidelman. According to accounts, the Tsar promised Pushkin that from then on he himself would be his censor. Georges Nivat draws attention to the fact that shortly before this the same Tsar had coldly signed the death sentence of Ryleyev, the poet’s friend, and raises a question that for us is crucial: was this not, to use modern language, a “deal” in which power and poetry in Russia met as equals for the first time, and in which the poet, in our eyes, rather lost and somewhat disgraced himself? Georges Nivat himself is cautious here and urges us not to hasten to a verdict, but for a Western Slavist of his standing the very posing of the question is a matter of principle.
The subsequent chronology speaks for itself. In September 1831 the pamphlet “On the Taking of Warsaw” appeared. In November of that same year, 1831, Pushkin was enrolled in the service of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs with a salary of five thousand roubles a year and access to the archives in order to write a history of Peter I. I do not claim that the one was direct payment for the other. But I do claim that a poet who writes a manifesto in support of the suppression of an uprising, and a state that shortly afterwards takes him into its service, belong to one and the same system of coordinates. Later would come the uniform of a kammerjunker, which Pushkin regarded as a humiliation, and after his death the Emperor would pay off his debts and grant his family a pension. This is not the story of a rebel poet. It is the story of a complicated but close relationship with the throne, in which loyalty ran both ways.
CONTEMPORARIES WHO UNDERSTOOD EVERYTHING
It is important that “To the Slanderers of Russia” caused discomfort not only among the Poles or the French, but within Pushkin’s own closest circle. His friend Pyotr Vyazemsky wrote in his diary in 1831 that in these verses Pushkin was thumbing his nose at Europe from inside his pocket, knowing that the verses would not be read there and that no one would answer the challenge. Vyazemsky also mocked the “geographical bravado”, that very inventory “from Perm to Tauris”, asking what there was to boast of here: that the country stretched over thousands of versts? In other words, even then there were people among the Russian elite who saw in this text imperial swagger rather than patriotism.
Far harsher was the reaction of Adam Mickiewicz, Pushkin’s former friend. Nivat recalls that after the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising of 1831 Mickiewicz became a fierce enemy of the Russian poet. In the poem “Do przyjaciół Moskali” (“To My Muscovite Friends”), included in the third part of “Forefathers’ Eve”, Mickiewicz addresses his former Russian friends and writes with pain that some of them have sold their souls for the Tsar’s favour and now glorify their master’s triumph. These lines have traditionally been read as addressed, among others, to Pushkin. The Polish poet saw what the West long refused to see: that a singer of freedom can at the same time be a singer of the enslavement of other peoples.
NOT ONLY PUSHKIN: THE CAUCASUS, POLTAVA AND LERMONTOV’S DAGGER
Pushkin was no exception, and “To the Slanderers of Russia” was not his only imperial text. In the epilogue to “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” he extols the conquest of the Caucasus and General Yermolov, before whom the Caucasus must “submit”. In the narrative poem “Poltava” Mazepa is portrayed as a treacherous traitor and Peter as a majestic victor; it was precisely through this text, studied in schools for decades, that the image of Ukraine’s attempt to free itself from Moscow as a base betrayal entered mass consciousness. The word “Mazepist” as a brand for the Ukrainian national movement has its direct roots in this tradition.
Lermontov continues the same line. A specific question requires a specific answer: what was Lermontov doing in the Caucasus? The answer is simple: he was an officer of the Russian colonial corps and took part in combat operations against the mountain peoples. Now reread his “The Dagger”: “I love you, my dagger of damask steel”, and further on how this dagger was “whetted for fearsome battle by a free Circassian”. The question is: why did a dagger whetted for battle by a free Circassian end up in the hands of a Russian officer, Mikhail Lermontov? In the poem it is presented by “a lily-white hand” as a keepsake, and therein lies the problem: the weapon of a free people becomes an aestheticised souvenir in the hands of an officer of the army conquering that people. The lyrical hero admires the weapon of a people soon to suffer genocide and expulsion. And when today I hear the name of the Russian hypersonic missile “Kinzhal” (“Dagger”), which strikes Ukrainian cities, I involuntarily recall this very poem. The coincidence of names may be accidental, but the cultural code is not.
TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF RETRANSMISSION
Imperial poetry does not remain in its own time. It lives as long as the state reproduces it. And the Russian state has reproduced Pushkin continuously and purposefully.
In 1880, at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow, Dostoevsky delivered his famous “Pushkin Speech”, in which he proclaimed Pushkin the prophet of the Russian people’s special “universal responsiveness”, of its vocation to unite and reconcile humanity. Thus the poet was turned into a symbol of Russian messianism: Russia as the bearer of a universal mission that entitles it to speak on behalf of all Slavs, and then of the whole world. The “Slavic streams” were now to merge in the “Russian sea” with the blessing of “all-humanity”.
In 1937, as Georges Nivat shows, the Stalinist state canonised Pushkin to the accompaniment of mass executions. The Soviet empire, which proclaimed its break with tsarism, inherited the tsarist poet without the slightest difficulty, together with his imperial picture of the world. This demonstrates very vividly that an empire remains an empire regardless of what it calls itself – a tsardom, a union or a republic.
In 1991–1992 Joseph Brodsky responded to Ukraine’s independence with the poem “On the Independence of Ukraine”, saturated with contempt for Ukrainians.
‘Dear Charles XII, the Battle of Poltava has, thank God, been lost. As the man who burred his r's used to say, ‘time will show Kuzka’s mother’ – ruins, the bones of posthumous joy with a hint of Ukraine. It’s not the green-and-flowery one, worn out by isotopes – the yellow-and-blue one flies over Konotop, cut from canvas; Canada must have stashed it away.”
Its culmination is the opposition of Pushkin and Shevchenko: Brodsky prophesied to Ukrainians that, when dying, they would recall Pushkin’s lines and not Shevchenko’s, which he insultingly called lies. A Nobel laureate, an exile, a victim of the Soviet system – and the very same imperial reflex. Pushkin is used here quite openly as a weapon against Ukrainian identity.
In 2011 Pushkin’s birthday, 6 June, was proclaimed Russian Language Day by decree of the President of Russia. Through the poet, language becomes a marker of space, and the space of the language becomes a justification for territorial claims. The logic of “where Russian is spoken, there is Russia” acquired its icon.
In 2014 and 2022 “To the Slanderers of Russia” was once again quoted en masse in the Russian media and online space as a ready-made answer to Western criticism of the annexation of Crimea and of the full-scale invasion. Representatives of the Russian intelligentsia, including those who consider themselves “outside politics”, circulated these lines at the beginning of the invasion, and the analogies were obvious to them: the empire will not tolerate Western interference in what it regards as its own territories, and Ukraine is viewed precisely as “its own” territory, as “a quarrel of Slavs among themselves”. Warsaw in 1831 and Kyiv in 2022 stand side by side in this consciousness. That is exactly why, after 2022, Ukraine too began dismantling monuments to Pushkin and renaming streets: Ukrainian society understood instinctively that these were not monuments to a poet but markers of imperial presence.
IS THE “SIMPLE PEASANT” TO BLAME?
Pushkin is one of the main channels through which the Western mind forms the image of the “simple Russian peasant”, supposedly innocent both of crimes and of a politics that is colonial and imperial in character. Pushkin’s “folk spirit”, the nanny Arina Rodionovna, the kindly Savelyich of “The Captain’s Daughter”, the enchanting fairy tales – all of this creates the image of a good, long-suffering, in its own way wise people oppressed by bad rulers. It is precisely this image that allows the West to separate “the regime” from “the people”, “Putin” from “the Russians”, “politics” from “culture”.
But this construction is doubly false. First, Pushkin himself, as I have already said, was a representative of the elite, not of the people, and his “people” is an aristocrat’s literary fiction. Second, and this is the main point, in the context of Russian imperial expansion this distinction changes little. The elites and the population in Russia share the same notions of a single and indivisible empire – regardless of whether it is called an empire, the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation. Pushkin performs here the function of a double alibi: for the elites he proves that empire can be beautiful and lofty in spirit; for the West he proves that a people that venerates such a poet cannot be responsible for the crimes of its state.
WHY “NOT OUR POET” IS NOT ENOUGH
Now to the main thesis. In Ukraine today the prevailing attitude towards Pushkin is that of a “foreign” poet: he is Russian, so let the Russians read him. This is correct, but it is not enough. Pushkin is not merely a foreign poet for Ukraine in a geographical or territorial sense. He is a poet hostile to Ukraine precisely in spirit and in mentality, because his most candid political texts justify the empire’s right to our lands, to Kyiv, to Volhynia, to “the legacy of Bohdan”, and deny the peoples who found themselves under Russian rule the right to their own choice. Pushkin must be perceived not only as “not our” poet, but as a poet who for more than two hundred years has remained a channel for advancing imperial narratives and a protective shield for them.
This is not a call to ban the study of Pushkin. On the contrary, it is a call to read him attentively and in full, without the school censorship that for decades removed “To the Slanderers of Russia” and “The Anniversary of Borodino” from mass consciousness, leaving only “the wondrous moment”. It is precisely selective reading that made Pushkin the ideal instrument: the world sees the lyrical genius, while Russia makes use of the political one.
OLD AND NEW EUROPE
Georges Nivat’s essay can therefore only be welcomed. It matters that these messages have begun to come from Western literary criticism itself, and from the lips of a man who has loved Russia and its literature all his life. Such a text attempts to put an end to the utterly false manipulation according to which great Russian culture – poetry, the novel, ballet – is something entirely different from, and remote from, Russian colonial policy.
The problem lies elsewhere. The present geopolitical map of Europe, or more precisely of old Europe, may well have little interest in such an awakening and in such an awareness of the role of cultural symbols in imperial expansion. For part of the Western elites, “great Russian culture” remains the last bridge to Russia, one they would like to preserve “for later”, for the time when the war is over and it will be possible to return to business as usual. To admit that this bridge is built of the same material as the tanks would mean abandoning that hope.
For new Europe, on the other hand, the problem may turn out to be entirely irrelevant – simply because it may no longer even know who Pushkin is. For Poles, Lithuanians, Estonians, Finns and Georgians, Pushkin’s “Tauris” and “Colchis”, the “haughty Pole” and the “cold Finnish crags” are not poetic images but historical experience. They woke up from Pushkin long ago.
The question remains whether the West will wake up for good. Georges Nivat’s essay gives hope that the process has begun. But as long as Pushkin remains “our everything” not only for Russia but also for European universities, theatres and concert halls, the empire will have in Europe its most persuasive lobbyist. A lobbyist who speaks in splendid verse and threatens Europe with graves for its sons.